Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Chinese Military Leadership Reshuffle Approaching

Defense News

11/01/2011

Chinese
Military Leadership Reshuffle Approaching

By WENDELL MINNICK

TAIPEI - China's
military still lags far behind the U.S., but a change in leadership in 2012
could herald a new era for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). That was the
conclusion of senior analysts attending a conference on the PLA here this week.

The conference,
"PLA in the Next Decade," sponsored by the Chinese Council of
Advanced Policy Studies and the Institute of Chinese Communist Studies (ICCS),
from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1, focused in part on the upcoming 18th National Congress
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012 and how the generational change of
the top leadership will reshape the PLA.

Vice President Xi
Jinping is expected to replace Hu Jintao as the CCP secretary general and
chairman of the all-powerful Central Military Commission (CMC).

"This transition
period will also be highlighted by a significant turnover in the composition of
the CMC leadership with the majority of the 10-member panel to retire,"
said Zhang Xiao-ming, a China specialist at the U.S. Air War College.

Xi, who is also the
vice chairman of the CMC, is seen as a pragmatist who will "accelerate the
cultivation of elite personnel, emphasize basic military training, put forth
new direction of cadre's ethics construction, and advance military
transformation based on science and technology development," said Fu
Li-Wen, a researcher at the ICCS.

Xi is known for his
hardline and outspoken style, Fu said. Xi once told an expatriate group of
Chinese "compatriots" in Mexico "there are a few foreigners,
with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at
our country."

The CMC reshuffle
will also mean a turnover of the directorship of the four general departments:
General Staff, General Political, General Logistic and General Armament. This
will include changes in the deputy directors and other subordinate leaders,
Zhang said. The new crop of leaders will also be more tech-savvy with more
hands-on experience in the military modernization process, he said.

The next leaders of
the CMC will be "younger, better educated and mission capable," said
Ji You, a specialist on the Chinese military at the University of New South
Wales.

"The
overwhelming majority of them have served in combat units and climbed through
'steps,'" he said.

This is also a
leadership that rode the wave of a fivefold increase in the defense budget over
the past 15 years.

China's booming
economy and massive investment in infrastructure is in stark contrast to the
U.S. financial crisis and anticipated slashing of the U.S. defense budget, said
Jaeho Hwang, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea.

China is the second
largest defense spender in the world, said Richard Bitzinger, a defense
industry specialist at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang
University, Singapore.

China's military
expenditures in 2011 totaled nearly $92 billion, "outstripping the United
Kingdom, France, Russia and Japan," he said. It most likely has the
world's second highest defense research and development budget, believed to be
around $6 billion.

"In other words,
China simply has more money to throw at its defense development, and this has
begun to reap tangible benefits over the past decade," Bitzinger said.

However, predicting
the future rise of China's military remains speculative.

"Our record is
mixed, largely due to the speed of Chinese development since the early
'90s," said Wallace "Chip" Gregson, the former U.S. assistant
secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, who gave the
keynote address at the conference.

Factors to consider
are "legacy thinking," he said, which is often expressed in doctrine
"that necessary evil that allows the orderly functioning of large
bureaucracies."

Another factor is
the mix of personalities, individuals and leadership, which contribute to a
"bewildering array of conditions, events and personalities" that
"collide in a profoundly random, human and subjective way to confound
mankind's efforts to build a logical, peaceful and ordered world."